Gun and Knife Show at Centraltrak is big and bold. It has teeth (and blades and bullets to spare). It frightens you, and yet may provoke a giggle or two as well. Most importantly, it’s a show that’s coherent, ambitious, and intelligent, bringing together a great variety of work for an idea that is well executed. Perhaps it is the result of the shortage of independent curators active in our region, or the lack of funds or the kinds of spaces needed to pull off this kind of show, but walking through Gun and Knife Show, I found myself nodding and murmuring: this is it, this it, by golly — a real life art exhibition, with real art and real ideas. And you’re in Centraltrak. Pinch yourself.

Gun and Knife Show had to be done in Texas. There is a certain iconic affinity between Texas and the firearm: its virile, outlaw-loving potency and this state’s unapologetic sense of individuality. It’s this same cultural cliché that makes Gun and Knife Show feel blunt at times; read co-curator Heyd Fontenot’s curatorial statement, and you’d think this is, in part, an occasion for anti-gun-toting, pacifist soap-boxing. Luckily the art here speaks more subtly.

Gun & Knife Show installation shot.

There is a lot of work included in Gun and Knife Show — paintings, prints, sculptures, drawings, assemblages, and photographs — and it works to the advantage of Fontenot and co-curator Julie Webb. For one, among the heaps of art, weaker works are easily passed over or ignored. They don’t detract from the overall show because the much-ness is a large part of the show’s power and message. Laid out like the interior of a dusty low-budget military museum, Gun and Knife Show hangs its work salon-style (stacked seemingly haphazardly up walls) within painted backgrounds made to look like framed display boards, as well as in glass cases in the center  of the rooms.

Gun & Knife Show installation shot with work by Roger Shimomura at center.

There are 98 pieces in the show from 39 artists, culled largely from Texas with a sizable representation via Seattle, and there is a leaning towards the folksy and visceral. Some offer predictable pastiches on the subject of gun – a gun light, a wooden gun, a gun covered in colorful pop-font decals, and a gun that is a penis with a vagina holster – while others push the literal approach a little further. Guns and knives take multiple guises: violent tools, accessories to murder, fetish objects, props, jewelry, sculptural objects, collectors’ items, architectural elements, or religious sacramentals.

Gabriel Dawe wraps a pistol in his trademark rainbow colored string, which has a Christo-like tempering-effect on the object, disarming function and accentuating form. Jack Daws’ carved wooden (and usable) sculptures of a dangerously sharp knife and pair of “brass” knuckles is forebodingly titled “Carry-ons.” Leaving aside the cultural and religious connotations of Al Farrow’s “Menorah X,” a candelabrum made up of multiple attached guns, the sculpture is interesting in the way it deconstructs the architectural integrity of the gun’s iconic shape.

Tim Roda, 'Untitled #164,' 2008 (Courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle)

There are plenty of wonderful photographs. Dotty Love’s gritty, evidence room photographs of murder weapons stand like hair-raising, diabolic relics. Leon Alesi manages to poke at something strange, absurd, and unnerving at the root of anger and aggression in his series of images, “Stranger #1-5,” 2011, which look like stills from an early Werner Herzog film. And Tim Roda’s “Untitled #164” matches the morbid realism of Sicialian crime documentarian Letizia Battaglia with the nightmarish cinematic suggestion of Cindy Sherman to stunningly beautiful and haunting effects.

Sterling Allen, "Knives," 2011 (detail)

Some of the most compelling works in the show don’t show guns at all. Among my favorites is Sterling Allen’s wise-guy found object assemblage, which presents a series of novelty nail clippers, each printed with the name of a tourist location or decorated with ornate stylizing and mounted on a framed board on the wall. The first distracting question Allen brings to our attention is humorous: who memorializes a trip by buying a pair of nail clippers? But the title of the piece, “Knives,” incites more sinister associations. Is Allen trying to undercut the way we conceive of the word “knives” by offering a dazzlingly mundane array of the most pragmatically benign objects, or is he suggesting that nail clippers are a gateway drug for obsessive compulsive psychopaths?

Works that capture the sex appeal – rather than the sexual nature – of weaponry prove more visually potent. Margaret Evangeline’s “Untitled”, 2010 is gold, glittering metal canvas, shot through with bullet holes, and it hangs like a glamour shot, a speechless celebration to the panache and power of the fired weapon. Terri Thomas’ “Spanish Spider/Breast Ripper,” 2010, is a glittery pair of scissors with cruel-looking claws instead of blades. An undeniable dream prop, it could be a tool for a sadistic molester or a memory of an unfortunate run-in with a barber.

Margaret Evangeline, "Untitled," 2010

These tongue-in-cheek reinterpretations of the curatorial intent of Gun & Knife Show provide the exhibition its fizz. In his curatorial statement, Fontenot speaks at length about guns as human creations designed for sheer violence, “not a part of the natural world,” imagined and developed “to destroy the very biological material and tissues of which we are composed.” Indeed, with many of these artists pounding away at this slice-and-dice motif, Gun & Knife Show feels at times paranoid, other times preachy and moralistic.

But these guns and knives are all about humanity’s complex relationship with tools, and by extension, technology. It is not that weaponry is innately evil, a kind of residue marking our fall from Eden or some Rousseauean state of nature. After all, as Sterling Allen reminds us, guns and knives do not function exclusively with malice. Knives cut our overgrown fingernails. And guns can propel flares to signal for help or shoot off fireworks in celebration. Rather, what really fascinates is the idea that at the root to our relationship with these objects of weaponry is the fetishization of power – physical, psychological, sexual. That is ultimately what receives a thorough going over in Gun & Knife Show, and, as demonstrated with the recent exuberance that followed the cinematic end of Osama bin Laden’s life (with a single bullet, as we were told), it is subject that proves ever-timely.

Image at top: Installation shot with work, bottom left, by Bruce Lee Webb, “Whitman,” 2011 (All images courtesy of Centraltrak except where noted).